About

The Assay Portal serves as a public resource of well-characterized quantitative mass spectrometry-based proteomic assays. The goal of the portal is to widely disseminate highly characterized MRM assays to the community, via access to SOPs, reagents, and assay validation data. The portal is designed to bring together biologists seeking to ask hypothesis-driven questions of the proteome with analytical chemists equipped to perform MRM assays.

The landing page of the portal is designed to be friendly to the biologist, enabling easy query of the MRM database for validated assays to proteins involved in specific cellular pathways or protein complexes, proteins whose genes map to specific chromosomal regions, or proteins associated with specified Gene Ontologies. The back end of the portal is designed to be friendly to the analytical chemist, providing assay validation data and associated SOPs for implementing the assays, the ability to view MRM data via Panorama, and the ability to download assay methods via a Skyline document.

An Amazon.com-like user rating and wiki is also available for the community to exchange information about how specific assays behave in others laboratories or previously uncharacterized matrices. An Assay Characterization Guidance Document is posted on the portal, with assay validation requirements and instructions for the community to submit their own MRM assays and help to grow and maintain high quality of the resource.

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be.